Jim, I'm curious: In what RF bandwidth will you be recording?
My first thought would be to search for a cross-correlation peak between the two antenna outputs, but quickly realized that this does not tell you anything about the timing differences between the two receivers. I think you need to determine that independently (else why bother with the interferometry in the first place?) The receive bandwidth in conjunction with your S/N on the PPS spikes will conspire to limit your timing accuracy, although you can improve on that by averaging over a few minutes as you plan. Dana On Fri, Apr 13, 2018 at 11:52 AM, Jim Lux <jim...@earthlink.net> wrote: > I'm building a phased array receiver (actually, an interferometer) using > RTL-SDR pods, where the elements are isolated from each other - there's a > common WiFi network connection, and each node has a BeagleBone Green, a > uBlox OEM-7M-C, and the RTL-SDR V3 (which works down to HF, since it has an > internal bypass around the RF front end). > > In general, I have the RTL-SDR set up to capture at 1 Megasample/second. I > fire off a capture, record it to a file in the BeagleBone's flash, then > retrieve it from my host computer using scp over the network. > > What I'm trying to do is capture data from all the nodes at > (approximately) the same time, then be able to line it all up in post > processing. The GPS (or NTP) is good enough to get them all to start > recording within a few tenths of a second. > > So now the challenge is to "line em up". An obvious approach is to > transmit an inband pilot tone with some sync pattern, received by all, and > I'm working on that too. > > But right now, I have the idea of capacitively coupling the 1pps pulse > from the GPS to the antenna input - the fast rising and falling edge are > broad band and show up in the sampled data. > > The attached pulses1.png shows the integrated power in 1 ms chunks (i.e. I > sum the power from 1000 samples for each chunk) and it's easy to see the > GPS edges. And it's easy to create a estimate of the coarse timing (to 1 > millisecond) - shown as the red trace. > > But then, I want to get better. So for the 20 edges in my 10 second > example, I plotted (drift1.png) the raw I/Q output of the RTL. The pulse > isn't too huge (maybe 10 DN out of the ADC's -128 to +128 range), but is > visible. Bottom trace is the first, and they're stacked up > 0, 0.1, 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 2.1, etc. > > And you can see, no surprise, that the sample clock in the RTL isn't dead > on - over the 10 seconds, it looks like it drifts about 30- 50 microseconds > - that is, the RTL clock is slow by 3-5 ppm. > > SO here's the question for the time-nuts hive-mind... > What's a good (or not so good) way to develop an estimator of the > timing/frequency error. Post processing minutes of data is just fine.. > > I'm not sure what the actual "waveform" that is being sampled is (and it > will be perturbed by the quantization of the ADC, and probably not be the > same depending on where the RTL is tuned). That is there's some sort of > LPF in the front of the RTL, the edge is AC coupled, and then it goes into > some sort of digital down converter in the RTL running at 28.8 MHz sample > rate. > > But it seems that there might be some way to "stack" a series of samples > and optimize some parameters to estimate the instantaneous time error- > given that the frequency vs time varies fairly slowly (over a minute or > so). It's fairly obvious from the plot that if one looked at the "single" > sample when the edge comes in, not only does the time shift with each > pulse, but the phase rotates as well (totally expected) > > this is one of those things where you could probably lay a ruler on it and > estimate it by eye pretty well, but I'd like an automated algorithm. > > It would be nice to be able to estimate the timing to, say, a few > nanoseconds over a minute or so ( - that would allow a phase estimation of > 1/10th of a wavelength of a 20 MHz signal (e.g. Jupiter's RF noise, or > WWVH's transmissions) > > > Ideas??? > > > > > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com > To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/ > mailman/listinfo/time-nuts > and follow the instructions there. > _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.